BERLIN, April 10. /TASS/. US journalist Seymour Hersh believes the plan to blow up the Nord Stream underwater natural gas pipelines was devised at the end of 2021 to threaten Russia and prevent it from starting the special military operation, he said in an interview with the German magazine Tichys Einblick that was published on Monday.
According to Hersh, the sabotage was conspired "just before New Year's Eve in 2021, probably around Christmas."
"The idea was to find something out of the ordinary that the [US] president could use, a lure or a threat to convince [Russian President Vladimir] Putin not to start a military operation [in Ukraine]," Hersh said in the interview. "Above all, it was a threat. I don't think this [US] government is very good at persuasion. They function more along the lines of ‘You are with us or against us.’ The idea was to tell Putin: If you cross the border into Ukraine, we will blow up the pipelines."
On September 27 Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented destruction at three threads of its Nord Stream pipeline that occurred the day before. Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on September 26 along the route of the pipelines. Russian prosecutors started investigating the incident as an attack by international terrorists.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh on February 8 published an article where he said, citing a source, that explosives under the Russian Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines were planted by US Navy divers, helped by Norwegian specialists, under the guise of the Baltops exercise in June 2022. The story stated US president Joe Biden personally authorized the operation after nine months of deliberations with the administration’s national security staff.